1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to techniques for determining power consumption in a computer system. More specifically, the present invention relates to a method and system for measuring the power efficiency of a computer system.
2. Related Art
In today's computer servers and storage systems, input/output operations per second (IOPS) per watt is a very important power efficiency metric that customers and vendors use to analyze the relative power efficiencies of different systems. However, methods to efficiently compute and monitor this metric in real time are currently unavailable.
In existing systems, IOPS per watt is measured by attaching hardware power monitors to individual computer systems. Data obtained by the power monitors must then be aggregated and processed to determine the computer systems' IOPS per watt. Such measurement techniques are cumbersome, tedious and expensive to implement in a data center containing a large number and variety of servers and/or storage systems. Consequently, power efficiencies of computer systems are difficult to assess using existing techniques.